In Thou Art That Matthew Leavitt Brown offers lyrical insights
into the complicated ways memory shapes us before, during, and after
terminal illness. Through a braided network of individual and disembodied
voices, Brown exemplifies a sense of how time, loss, and grief comingle to
form a new presence that comes to both fill and haunt the void left by the
death of a loved one. Written during the long-term illness and passing of
several of his immediate family members, as well as during a prolonged
illness of own, these poems capture something important about the spiritual
alienation and search for purpose that necessarily accompany our collective
condition of human frailty.

"'Thou art that,' the Hindu Vedas pronounce, pointing to the self
illuminated by inner divinity. Matthew Brown's Thou Art That
traces the holiness of a divinized love in the face of illness and death,
as boundaries between one lover's self and another dissolve, as do all
borders between lyric self and lives of the character who speaks these
poems, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third; sometimes in verse
and sometimes in prose; now subject, now object. This novella in verse
gives us lives wracked by love and blessed by loss, in a delicate, moving,
spiritual meditation on the nature of love and its endings, on the ways in
which a great love will 'give you reasons to have been born.'" --Bruce
Beasley

Matthew Leavitt Brown is a writer, educator, and activist who is best known
for his poetry and multimedia artwork that have been published and featured
online and across North America and Europe. He is the founder and
facilitator of community literacy programs that help develop and advocate
for the voices of individuals who have experienced trauma including
veterans (Writer Corps), survivors of domestic and sexual violence
(The Lavinia Project), refugees and immigrants ( Nuestras Voces), and others. He currently teaches writing and
literature at Middle Tennessee State University and lives with his wife,
son, and daughter in Nashville.